from Stu Cowan of the Montreal Gazette at Canada.com,

Hockey sticks have come a long way from the days when I was a kid and there was no better feeling than taking your first slapshot with a brand-new Sher-Wood P.M.P. 5030 in your hands.

The P.M.P. was a fantastic stick until the bottom of the wooden blade would begin to split, it would get waterlogged, lose its snap on the puck and you’d be begging your parents to buy you another one.

The reason kids from my generation wanted the P.M.P. is that it was the stick most of the pros were using. More than 200 NHLers were using the P.M.P. model during the late 1970s and more than 6 million of those wooden sticks were made after Sher-Wood first put them on the market in 1976.

Other popular sticks over the years included the white Canadien model that was used by a number of former Habs, including my favourite Montreal defenceman, Guy Lapointe; the Victoriaville stick that my favourite player, Bobby Orr, used with one strip of black tape; the Koho model Mario Lemieux preferred early in his career; and the Titan stick Wayne Gretzky used before switching to the silver Easton aluminum shaft with the wooden blade when he was with the Los Angeles Kings.

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